Time-turner
|Inventor = |Invented For = Time-travelling |Owner = * Ministry of Magic ** Hermione Granger }}A time-turner was a wizarding device used for time-travelling. About A time-turner was a tiny, sparkling hourglass attached to a very fine, long gold chain. Everyone who wanted to time-travel had to be inside that chain. The number of times you turn the hourglass was how many hours you wanted to travel back in time to, e.g. turn it two times to go back two hours. Your surrounding dissolved into a blur of colours and shapes when travelling, and you feel like your flying backwards. You land in the location you were hours earlier, just seconds before your past-self arrived. Time-travellers had to abide by natural and very important wizarding laws, including how you cannot be seen and you cannot change what happened in the past. Being seen could cause awful things to happen, including killing your past or future self. You had to hide right away, before your past-self arrived and saw you. If anyone wanted to use a time-turner, they had to get special permission by the Ministry of Magic. They had to plead their case and argue for why they could be trusted. History Hermione Granger wanted to take every subject at Hogwarts in her third-year, but she wouldn't have time to attend every lesson. Professor McGonagall wrote letters to get her a time-turner, arguing she was a very trustworthy and intelligent student who wouldn't use it for anything but her studies. She was successful, and Hermione was given her time-turner on her first day of her third-year. She promised she would never tell anyone she had it. Hermione's friends were confused by her timetable because she had lessons at the same time. She kept disappearing when she was heading towards lessons, and suddenly appearing again when her lesson was about to start. She began struggling to keep up with her school work, and forgetting to go to lessons because she was losing track of time. She soon gave up studying Divination. She later gave up Muggle Studies too, having found both subjects useless and needing time for a normal schedule. In June, Hermione used a time-turner to take her and Harry Potter back three hours in time to save Sirius Black and Buckbeak. Harry was very confused, and struggled to understand how he couldn't change anything in the past. He had to be held back to stop any intervening. Harry learned time was self-fulfilling when he found out he had saved himself, Black and Hermione earlier by using a Patronus Charm to fend Dementors away. He gained confidence in knowing he had done it earlier and had to be capable. Harry and Hermione had to be back in the Hospital Wing by the time they had time-travelled at. Dumbledore needed to ensure they couldn't be suspected of helping Black escape, and wanted to lock her and Harry in the Wing. So they had a very short window before people like Fudge and Snape will have learned Black had escaped, and go back to the Hospital Wing. They got back in time and got locked in, just before Fudge got back too. Snape suspected they had been involved, but didn't have any evidence. Hermione gave her time-turner back, having dropped two subjects and not having any need for a time-turner. Ron was disappointed she didn't tell anyone she even had one. Behind the scenes * Time-travel is a concept which will cause at least a few plot-holes, and varying kinds of potential effects exist. In literature, a writer will typically employ just one of three theories of time-travel, because using two or three will cause huge contradictory issues for a story. ** In , Harry experienced a self-fulfilling event which obeys a theory of time-travel called the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, which states "nothing can be changed because anything a traveller does merely produces the circumstances they had noted before travelling", and "any time travel into the past was always part of history, and so the course of events is not changed". ** Characters in Harry Potter books used a time-turner just once in . Their use of a time-turner was for a trivial task which didn't have any effect on time itself. However, laws do exist and seeing your past and future-self does appear to have an effect on your own mental state (but without time itself changing). The Novikov self-consistency principle proposes that contradictory causal loops cannot form, but that consistent ones can. Notes and sources Category:Wizarding objects